Ethereum RPC endpoint

This is a general guide on deploying an Ethereum RPC endpoint for your Chainlink Node(s).

Official Ethereum Docs are available here

NOTE

This document assumes base operating system is Debian 10

Ethereum RPC Endpoints:

• Websocket
  • ws://<your_ip_address>:8546
• HTTP
  • http://<your_ip_address>:8545

Install Dependencies

Before we can get our Ethereum node running, we need to install some necessary software.

we'll install some packages that we'll need or will at least be handy to have.

sudo apt install -y git curl wget jq node-ws telnet traceroute build-essential make

Install Go

Navigate to the official Go download page at go.dev/doc/install, and copy the link address for the download button.

Once you have the link, we'll use wget to download it.

Please remember that the below examples have <version> in lieu of the release that was applicable at the time of writing

wget https://go.dev/dl/go<version>.linux-amd64.tar.gz

This will download the tarball, which we will see is named go<version>.linux-amd64.tar.gz.

To start, we'll want to extract the tarball

tar xvf go<version>.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Now that the packages has been extracted, we should have a new directory named, go

We'll adjust permissions on the directory, then relocate it to out /usr/local/ directory.

sudo chown -R root:root ./go

sudo mv go /usr/local/

And then, we'll modify our ~/.profile file and then force a reload of it.

nano ~/.profile

We'll want to add the following to the bottom of the ~/.profile file

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin

Once those lines have been added to our profile, we need to force our TTY session to load it.

source ~/.profile

We'll know all is well when we check to see the path to the command and check to see what version of Go we have installed

which go

You should get /usr/local/go/bin/go as the path to the command

go version

We should see the newly installed verison, go version go<version> linux/amd64

Download & Install Ethereum Node Software

First, we'll need to clone the go-ethereum repository

git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum.git

Once cloned, we'll change directories into the newly downloaded go-ethereum directory

cd go-ethereum

Then, we'll compile the necessary binaries.

make all

Once it's finished compiling the binaries, we will be able to find them in the build directory, ~/go-ethereum/build/bin/geth.

we can check to confirm the operation of the binary by checking the verison

./build/bin/geth --version

We should see the version printed to the terminal

Lastly, we'll create a directory for our Ethereum Node's data

mkdir ~/geth

Create Ethereum Node Service

Create a new service file for your ethereum node.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/geth-node.service

Copy and paste the below into the new file, modifying the necessary values

We'll want to update the <username> to your correct value.

[Unit]
 Description=Go Ethereum Full Node
 After=network.target auditd.service
 Wants=network.target
 
 [Service]
 Type=simple
 User=<username>
 WorkingDirectory=~/geth
 TimeoutStartSec=0
 TimeoutStopSec=120
 ExecStart=/home/<username>/go-ethereum/build/bin/geth \
 --mainnet \
 --cache 8192 \
 --log.json \
 --verbosity 2 \
 --metrics \
 --http \
 --http.addr 0.0.0.0 \
 --http.vhosts '*' \
 --ws \
 --ws.addr 0.0.0.0 \
 --ws.origins 0.0.0.0 \
 --datadir ~/geth
 Restart=always
 RestartSec=10s
 
 [Install]
 WantedBy=multi-user.target
 RequiredBy=swarm.service
 Alias=geth-node.service

Start Ethereum Node Service

Once we have the service file created, we can start it with a simple command, but first, we'll reload our daemons to be sure that it detects the newly created service file.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Then,

sudo systemctl start geth-node.service

Check Status of Ethereum Node Service

We can check the status of the service itself by checking the system logs for the specific service

sudo journalctl -u binance-node.service

If we want to check the status/state of the endpoints sync, we can simply query the RPC endpoint to see what the block height is, and compare that against the explorer.

Here's a simple bash script that does exactly that.

be sure to add your api key in place of <api_key>

#!/bin/bash
 
 # blue foreground
 blue_fg=$(tput setaf 6)
 # reset to default
 reset=$(tput sgr0)
 
 # SET VARS
 BLOCK_HEIGHT=$(curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:8545 -d '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 123, "method": "eth_blockNumber"}' | jq -r .result)
 ETHERSCAN_BLOCK_HEIGHT=$(curl -s -d "action=eth_blockNumber&apikey=<api_key>&module=proxy" -X POST https://api.etherscan.io/api | jq -r .result)
 PEER_COUNT=$(curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:8545 -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"net_peerCount","params":[],"id":74}' | jq -r .result)
 IS_SYNCING=$(curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:8545 -d '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 123, "method": "eth_syncing"}' | jq .)
 
 echo "----------------------"
 echo "RPC Node block height: ${blue_fg}$((BLOCK_HEIGHT))${reset}"
 echo "Ethersan block height: ${blue_fg}$((ETHERSCAN_BLOCK_HEIGHT))${reset}"
 echo "Current peer count:    ${blue_fg}$((PEER_COUNT))${reset}"
 
 VAR1=$(curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:8545 -d '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 123, "method": "eth_syncing"}' | jq .result)
 VAR2="false"
 if [ "$VAR1" = "$VAR2" ]; then
     echo "Sync Status:           ${blue_fg}Node is synced.${reset}"
 else
     echo "${blue_fg}Node is ${yellow_fg}NOT${blue_fg} synced.${reset}"
 fi